I normally avoid writing anything about the Daily Mail as it’s such a cheap punchline for unfunny Radio 4-type comedians. But on occasion, they go so far beyond the call of duty that it’s hard to ignore them. And this week, they absolutely hit the bullseye.

For anyone who missed it, the Mail decided on Tuesday that it was a good time to start lacing into the dead father of Labour leader Ed Miliband. Ralph Milliband, for about 98% of the population, is a complete irrelevance. For that small minority who care about such things, he was a political scientist and academic, mainly writing from the 1950s-1970s, and generally considered to be one of the foremost leftwing thinkers of his time. For The Mail, this obviously required them to commission Geoffrey Levy to hack together 2000 words painting Miliband as a raving, totalitarian menace who hated everything that decent British people stand for, and would only have been happy if Stalin’s troops had been marching down Whitehall and playing football with the Queen Mum’s head. By suggestion, Miliband junior had probably picked up a fair bit of this, so it was in the public interest to put all this material out there. And to bracket it under the snappy headline, THE MAN WHO HATED BRITAIN. They also illustrated the shot with a photo of Milliband’s headstone and the punning caption ‘grave socialist’. Even for an editor like Paul Dacre, who apparently prides himself on being one of the media’s leading belligerent arseholes, this was a tasteless shot.

Rather predictably, this story fell to pieces under the slightest scrutiny. The main evidence in Levy’s piece was a diary entry written by the 17-year-old Ralph. Almost immediately, the biographer from whose book the lines had been lifted popped up to point out that they’d been taken completely out of context. And also that there were a few more pertinent facts about Milliband and his relationship to Britain — that, rather than ‘hating’ this country, he was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe who had volunteered at the first opportunity to join the Royal Navy and fight fascism. Indeed, as he didn’t become a British national until 1946, he could have sat the war out, but instead signed up to do his bit. There’s also an excellent round-up here of how while he was leftwing, throughout his academic career he was anything but an apologist for Stalin.

Being generous, the whole affair has been a calculated attempt to attack Ed Miliband because his vaguely left-wing recent pronouncements (about stopping developers sitting on unused land and preventing energy companies inflating your bills) and support for regulating the press have put the ideological and commercial frighteners on the Mail. Being less generous, it was a venomous outpouring by a paper that frequently seems in the grip of a cross between a split personality disorder and an undiagnosed brain-eating virus.